It will be possible to enable NPAPI in Chrome for some time yet. The reason for disabling it by default is to push plugin vendors to port to better approaches that don't leave your system security at the mercy of whatever web page you happen to hit.

When it comes to laptops though, you're never going to build one yourself. Apple is the only vendor that actually sells "non-sucking" laptops if you will. HP sells nothing but the cheapest trash for laptops, and just about everyone else has gone out of business. It's incredibly painful to see people have to replace their Taiwan-brand laptop every 2 years, or watch people buy Chromebooks and then return them a month later because the build quality is rock-bottom.

You know there are laptop manufacturers besides HP and Acer, right? Asus, Samsung, and Toshiba have traditionally had good reputations for quality.

I remember working on a project where network coding was proposed for micro satellite cluster communications. If I remember correctly, network coding requires that all the nodes in the network have complete knowledge of the state of the network at any given transmission window. This requires transmission of the network state which used something like 7% overhead. The routing of a message from one end of the cluster to the other was difficult. I believe it might have been an np-complete problem. Have they solved the routing issues?

Dolphins and chimps are quite intelligent, I will give you that. But I would place parrots (look up the New Zealand Kea on youtube), corvids (crows, ravens, etc), octopuses, whales, and elephants before pigs.

Boycott BMG writes: Recent discussion on/. about the Samsung and LG curved displays seems to dismiss them as mostly gimmicks, but in an article at Displaymate Dr. Raymond Soniera explains one of the advantages of curved displays: altering the reflections.
From the article:

Reflections from a Curved Screen

The concave screen shape on the Galaxy Round cuts down on reflections from the surrounding ambient light two ways: first, by reducing the screen’s 180 degree opening angle, which eliminates reflections from some ambient light coming from the sides. Second, from specular mirror reflections off the concave screen, because the curvature directs reflected ambient light coming from behind away from the viewer’s line of sight. This is very important because you want to minimize the amount of ambient light that is seen reflected off the screen.

Curved Screen Magnification

But the most interesting and important result of the slightly curved Galaxy Round screen is that it magnifies the sizes of all of the objects that it reflects, just like a concave mirror that I mentioned above. As it turns out, that substantially cuts down on the interference of light reflections from ambient light in three ways:

I don't know what genre of game the submitter plays, but for fighting games, which I play, input latency can mean the difference between winning and losing. 50ms is 3 frames of lag, which means you need to react 3 frames faster to an overhead or throw. This wouldn't be a problem if everyone used the same equipment, ie PlayStation controller, but if someone had a controller that somehow had lower latency than the regular controllers then everyone who wants to compete would flock to it.

The fact is that smartphones and tablets have replaced PC notebooks for some tasks like email, calendar/scheduling, and instant messaging. If a certain percentage of the population used a PC primarily for those things then they might delay upgrading their PC and instead get a smartphone.

I appreciate the suggestion but I very much remain dubious they will get it "right". While I don't have anything against those features they are superfluous. Someone needs to get drawing and note taking right. It should work very much like writing on a paper note pad and be very easy to use. Every pen implementation I've seen so far gets carried away with handwriting recognition and other theoretically nifty features (which rarely work very well) but don't make just writing/drawing easy which is the bit that actually matters. It's more important that *I* be able to write and recognize what I wrote than the computer. I remain hopeful but so far every attempt I've seen has fallen badly short.

In fact, the note series does let you just scribble or doodle or whatever. The handwriting and formulae recognition is a feature you need to tap to activate.

You may be looking for the galaxy note series from samsung. The whole series (note 1, note 2, note 10.1, note 8) have features like formula match, which reads your handwritten equations and tries to guess what the formula was, shape match for diagrams, and handwriting recognition.